> Being generous makes you more powerful. As Tim O'Reilly said, you should create more value than you capture. Many hard-headed business types would write this off as idealistic hippy stuff, but in fact this is the route to becoming really rich.
> Hired CEOS take the power of the companies they run for granted, whereas founders remember the days when the company was so weak that it had to delight users to survive.
I've always instinctively followed the generosity path, and have experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed (or not added in the first place), good things will follow.
However, I have not always been able to convince others to trust in and follow this path. Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
My sense is that it's context dependent. If you've got VC backing (or could soon) and are making deals in SF, the generosity path makes a lot of sense. Limited downside, infinite upside. You can afford generosity.
If you're starting with $2000 and bootstrapping a textiles business out of Kolkata, it's a terrible idea, you're likely going to immediately get burned and never recover.
(take with a grain of salt as I have no experience, just stating my observations)
Generosity is not "giving stuff away for free when it hurts you badly to do so." Neither the giver nor the receiver are comfortable when generosity hurts the giver, and the dignity of both may be compromised as well. Generosity that is disrespectful of comfort and dignity is worth very little.
A company with $2000 in its first few days need not give away $1000 to act generously.
> always instinctively followed the generosity path
> experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed
Charlie Munger:
When other companies find ways to save money, they turn it into profit. [Costco] passes it on to customers. It’s almost a religious duty. [They] sacrifice short-term profits for long-term success”.
> talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
I'd say this is a wrong framing. It isn't the people; it is the systems & environs they are in, the incentives they operate under.
Economists have a term they call "willingness-to-pay", using which some business might optimize for "consumer surplus" (low price), some for "producer surplus" (high margin).
before the pandemic hit and most of the world was quarantined, we decided to give loom away to students and teachers for free and made the service 50% off indefinitely. this was generous but also strategic. we made the simple deduction that, should people be locked inside, they would naturally see their sons/daughters using loom as students. or their spouse or roommates as teacher/staff.
> Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
Yes. Lend them many more pennies, removing the necessity for short-term profit taking and allowing them to run at a loss until they decimate the competition, capture the market and then start raising prices to the point that they are more profitable than had they taken the short-sighted approach.
This depends on what you are building and what your goals are. What pg is referring to is how to build transformative companies, unicorns if you will.
There's plenty of businesses where you are simply optimizing a funnel, and driving more revenue at all costs is fully aligned with the goals of the company
I'm nearly always building early stage companies, where even the dev and operational overhead of charging for some added extra is not guaranteed to be paid for by the money collected.
As a startup with deep pockets, you think you can afford to be generous, without realising it is made possible due to borrowed time and money. When the bills come due, generosity ends and enshittification onsets.
People are more sympathetic to pg retaining a sense of purpose (than Terry Tao) because they rightfully imagine that's it's easy to obtain the virtues that he has (the generosity, the optimism, the agency,the lack of worry, the curiosity, the faith in all sorts of humanity)
Exactly what I came to say. This 100% is hippy dippy head in the clouds stuff. Sure if your product is 100% digital you can "be generous" in so far as it costs you nothing. Real products, real services. Hell no. You will get robbed blind if you give people too much slack or come off as willing to easily pay out.
I learned this the hard way early on doing contract work. Multimillionaires would actively try to take advantages of my naivety and inexperience to coerce free work out of me. Also I highly suspect many of them get a sick sense of pleasure out of it. Good luck being "generous" to those types.
Take a look at those donate for pain videos on tiktok if you don't believe there is significant population of sadists out there.
Never be generous with the product itself. In consulting, the product is your time - you can't give that away. In textiles the product is the physical textiles - you can't give that away. In tech start-ups the product is a growing userbase - you can't give that away.
Who ever wants to manipulate the user using their PII and associated metadata - Retail, Marketers, Political and Security Apparatus... the world is your dystopian oyster in that regard.
The topic is specifically sexual abuse, porn vs erotic books.
The commenter tried to play the "erotic romance books are as bad as hard core porn and no one is treating it that way" bullshit.
Women do create political ideologies and movements. They do participate in them too. The topic is specifically who is building and defending sexual abuse networks, who is invested more in defending right to abuse.
The fact the list ends at 2 women who were already named, when the men involved number in the hundreds and are still being protected, kind of ruins your point…
I've got plenty more if you want them. The fact that any exist at all is enough to prove that the statement "women dont create whole networks of sexual abuse" was a lie.
Ghislaine Maxwell was a part od male run male dominanted abuse network. The one which was supported by powerful men in goverment and politicians. Adult women were minority there.
Nice try. But while some women were part of Epstein network, overall it was male network. And pretty ideologically misogynistic at that.
Every person must have some natural violence pre disposition but that needs to be weighed by their ability to inflict it. I could be a super violent guy on a desert island and so never inflict violence. How physically strong you are must come into that which means opportunities for violence go down with physical size. Even if I want to be violent if I'm somewhat rational and don't want to get beat up.
It's not clear to me if women are less predisposed to violence or have on average less opportunity due to average smaller physical size specially compared to men. Though from experience I would say women also seem less pre disposed to violence in the first place.
Size doesn't matter all that much in the modern world. Even toddlers can murder people with a gun. Tiny people can kill very effectively with knives, poisons, cars, etc. The smaller you are the easier it can be to get away with it too.
This is not true. IIRC this factoid comes from the results of surveys asking people whether they had ever been the victims of domestic violence (not necessarily in their current relationships), and it should come as no surprise that relationships comprised of two women have the highest reporting rates of having been subjected to violence over their lifetimes, and relationships of two men the lowest rates. Within-relationship rates of domestic violence for lesbian couples are not higher than for heterosexual couples!
I’ve been wondering if vibe coding was responsible for the recent introduction of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) bugs in FaceTime (muting and unmuting the microphone appears to temporarily fix it). Apple has always had excellent AEC in my experience, it’s sad to see them breaking a fundamental phone function.
Perfectly for me I guess I should have said. Nonetheless, this md file packaging mistake suggests that at least once they’ve fallen into not reviewing changes properly, and I wonder if that lack of discipline is more widespread. I hope not, otherwise their ability to deliver on their privacy promises will be compromised.
It's not the case at all - years ago we tested Pong with human neurons vs mouse neurons, and human neurons performed better. More importantly, they allow the study of the effect of external interventions (such as trial medicines) on the learned function of human neurons. So we spent years building a machine and software platform to facilitate this sort of research.
The Doom project is mostly a bit of fun that demonstrates how quickly someone new to the field can see real results with our platform. Our data scientists believe that biological learning was demonstrated in this case.
Cortical Labs CTO here. My focus is on the system itself rather than applications, but for what it's worth ..
When the neurons didn't get stimulated by the application, performance did not improve. The only explanation our data science people has is that the neurons began to learn and perform the desired (highly abstracted) task of 'playing Doom'. This was not a surprise as we've shown this before with a version of Pong using a different platform. We built the CL1 and the CL API to enable rapid iteration on this sort of work.
One benefit to this is that when you have a measurable learning effect, you can measure this before and after exposure to an experimental drug or other molecule. It becomes possible to test the impact on neuron function, not just survival.
It was a great video. You're doing interesting work.
I've also seen implementations of realistic neurons, spiking models, etc. In software implementations, what combo of libraries and hardware would equal your 200,000 biological neurons in performance (esp training)? How many GPU's are we talking about?
(Note: If you haven't already, it might be helpful to publish a stack like that so people can experiment with encodings or reinforcement methods at no cost to you.)
We focus on using real neurons, I'm not aware of a software based equivalent. But users can `pip install cl-sdk` to get started with our API. The SDK is still early but supports playing back a recording of real data so applications can be built with a realistic spike frequency. (We'll be releasing a set of recordings for this)
For academic papers, the phrases they use include "biologically plausible," "Hebbian learning," and "backpropagation free." Searching for those with "neural networks" or "neurons" will turn up cutting-edge techniques.
We'll likely leave the answering of your equivalence question to our users. While we do plenty of internal research, the primary goal of our cloud platform is to dramatically expand access to this field. There are no doubt many low-hanging fruits to be discovered.
I work on the software stack for a biological computing platform (think: tool for programming with human neurons in a dish).
Coding work spans FPGA (SystemVerilog), Linux kernel C, userspace C, Python, and yes, some web services and Browser JavaScript also. I also work on the network engineering of the cloud service and on the Linux OS image.
Easily the most fun I’ve had as a developer and I’ve worked on lots of different types of commercial software projects before. Not all the world is web apps, embedded work can be very satisfying if you’ve not considered it.
The neurons live on an electrode array kept inside a machine which keeps them alive (body temperature, sugar, gas, etc). The embedded system continually measures the voltage at each electrode, and can electrically stimulate the neurons via the same.
Users are provided with an easy to use Python API that allows realtime observation of the raw signals and of detected action potentials (spikes). They can also execute precisely controlled stimulation sequences, which allows information to be presented to the neurons. Then there are a lot of higher level application APIs to handle things like recording data, real-time visualisation, and experiment config management.
Why: it appears to be possible to teach neurons to perform tasks (we taught some to play pong several years ago). Since then our focus has been on building a system that enables rapid iteration in this sort of research. We're selling the system to organisations that have the appropriate biology skills, and renting access to hosted devices where we provide and take care of the cells.
Woooah. Impressive. Sounds like a very fulfilling and interesting job! Love anything that makes software integrate better or impact directly the physical world
If a programmer is more efficient with AI then you need fewer programmers, assuming a fixed amount of work is needed. So in that sense AI would be replacing programmers.
This reminds me of the time when Quake started rendering inside the start button of the Windows 95 desktop (or maybe Win 98). I wish I could remember the details but it think it was something to do with alt-tab.
That quirky effect is a known quirk of early DirectDraw/WinQuake on Windows 95/98. When a game grabbed the primary surface in certain modes, parts of the desktop GDI (like the Start button/taskbar) could briefly be overdrawn or show the game’s backbuffer due to how DirectDraw managed the primary surface and cooperative levels in fullscreen and windowed modes on those systems.
This sounds incredible and makes me want to go through a similar learning process. I don’t suppose anyone could recommend a book or course along these lines?
A lot of us started out putting together some of the circuits in Forrest Mims Radio Shack books [1]. He does a good job of explaining how they work as well.
And then there is an amazing site with (thousands of ?) electronics hobbyist magazines archived [2]. If you want to start browsing, they often ran series in their issues along the lines of "getting started in electronics". Regardless, some awesome projects in there.
But if you want to go back pre-transistor (ha ha) the U.S. Navy had a great series on learning electronics [3]. Def. analog.
The Art of Electronics is an incredible resource. They have a companion book which guides you through hands-on labs. I have not read it, but I trust that it would be worthwhile.
> Hired CEOS take the power of the companies they run for granted, whereas founders remember the days when the company was so weak that it had to delight users to survive.
I've always instinctively followed the generosity path, and have experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed (or not added in the first place), good things will follow.
However, I have not always been able to convince others to trust in and follow this path. Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?